Sunday, June 21, 2015

Barack Obama must be wondering what hit him

President Hussein Obama must be wondering what hit him. Former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren continues to hammer away at the President, publishing two more op-ed pieces in the US media on Friday, one of which really gets into Obama's kishkes.

In Foreign Policy, Oren took Obama to task for not joining the
solidarity march in France after the attack on Charlie Hebdo or the
kosher supermarket earlier this year, nor for sending two senior
officials who were in Paris at the time to the march. He also took the
president to task for not admitting that the attack on the kosher
market was directed a Jews, but rather an act perpetrated by “vicious
zealots who... randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli.”

“Obama’s
boycotting of the memorial in Paris, like his refusal to acknowledge
the identity of the perpetrators, the victims, or even the location of
the market massacre, provides a broad window into his thinking on Islam
and the Middle East. Simply put: The president could not participate
in a protest against Muslim radicals whose motivations he sees as a
distortion, rather than a radical interpretation, of Islam,” he wrote.
“And if there are no terrorists spurred by Islam, there can be no
purposely selected Jewish shop or intended Jewish victims, only a deli
and randomly present folks."

During his first year in office,
Obama, Oren argued, offered in essence “a new deal in which the United
States would respect popularly chosen Muslim leaders who were
authentically rooted in their traditions and willing to engage with the
West.”

...

Oren
attributed this orientation to the intellectual milieu in which Obama
grew up, as well as his personal history. “I could imagine how a child
raised by a Christian mother might see himself as a natural bridge
between her two Muslim husbands. I could also speculate how that
child’s abandonment by those men could lead him, many years later, to
seek acceptance by their co-religionists.”

The tragedy, he said, was that Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world was rejected.

“Historians
will likely look back at Obama’s policy toward Islam with a
combination of curiosity and incredulousness,” he wrote. “While some
may credit the president for his good intentions, others might fault him
for being naïve and detached from a complex and increasingly lethal
reality.”

In the LA Times piece, headlined “Why Obama is
wrong about Iran being 'rational' on nukes,” Oren quoted Obama’s
comment in a recent interview that being anti-Semitic, or racist,
doesn't preclude one from from being interested in survival, and that
just because Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei is anti-Semitic
“doesn't mean that this overrides all of his other considerations.”

Oren
wrote that the dispute whether Iran was a rational or irrational actor
was “ever-present” in the discussions between the US and Israel when
he was ambassador. While the American view the Iranians as logical
actors, Israel could not rule out the idea that “the Iranians would be
willing to sacrifice half of their people as martyrs in a war intended
to ‘wipe Israel off the map.’”

“Obama would never say that
anti-black racists are rational,” Oren argued. “And he would certainly
not trust them with the means – however monitored – to reach their
racist goals. That was the message Israeli officials and I conveyed in
our discreet talks with the administration. The response was not, to
our mind, reasonable."

Oren, while he served in Washington, was
considered very cautious and diplomatic, and rarely caught flack for
comments deemed “undiplomatic.”

Oren has been blasted by opposition MK's Tzipi Livni (goes without saying), Avigdor Liberman and Yair Lapid (the latter also goes without saying). But Lee Smith wrote some similar things in Tablet Magazine last week, but from a slightly different angle.

Whether Obama is an honorary Jew or not, the evidence suggests that
he keenly understands certain peculiarities of the Jewish communal
psyche—survival strategies that distinguish the Jews from other American
minority groups. The president’s use of Jewish aides and organizations
to advance his policies with the Jewish community shows that Obama is
correct in believing that Jewish politics are often motivated by fear,
which can range from the existential fear of mass extermination to the
more prosaic fear of looking shabby in front of the goyim. And Obama
isn’t using his energy and inspiring leadership skills to help these
people rise above their fear; he is instead capitalizing on
it—masterfully, ruthlessly—by manipulating American Jews in ways that
other minority groups would find unbelievably insulting.

Consider recent statements from Jewish aides to the president.
Netanyahu is the kind of politician, said David Axelrod, “who run[s] for
public office because they want to be somebody.” Israel doesn’t know
what’s best for it, Obama’s former envoy to the Palestinian-Israeli
peace process Martin Indyk told Israeli media last week. “You are an
emotional nation, not a rational nation,” he sniffed. “You work from
your gut and not your mind.”

It’s very hard to imagine Catholic policymakers helping a U.S.
president undermine and insult the Vatican and then defending the
president when he says that he understands what the church stands for
better than the pope does. During the darkest moments of the AIDS
crisis, there were no gay organizations that encouraged U.S.
policymakers to cut funding for a cure. There are no transgender
activists who argue that the real threat to the community comes not from
people who fear and hate transgendered people, but from within the
transgender community itself. Eric Holder doesn’t scold people of color
that they’re an emotional, not a rational, people, or imply that black
officeholders get into politics because they “want to be somebody.”

The issue in America today is clearly not that pro-Obama people or
organizations are leading the American Jewish community to destruction.
Yet at the same time, it is also clear that two millennia of diasporic
dependence and insecurity have left a deep and probably permanent
imprint on the Jewish communal psyche. Even in America, a free country
in which Jews have never been subject to European-style mass oppression
or persecutions, the role performed by “court Jews’ still makes
structural and emotional sense to people who like to think of themselves
as independent thinkers. Otherwise, it would be hard to explain why
Obama still has the support of the majority of the Jewish community for
policies that from any rational perspective—the perspective of any other
minority group—cannot be seen as anything other than detrimental to the
Jewish state.

In other words, Oren is right about Obama's bad treatment of Jews as compared with any other ethnic group. Obama isn't playing any other ethnic group - only Jews. And according to Smith, Obama is playing the Jews like a master.

But what about the Jews who speak for the administration? None of
several former high-ranking Jewish officials was willing to speak on the
record on this subject, but every single one of them agreed that this
moment was an extraordinary one. “No administration will always do what
the Jewish community wants or what Jews think best for Israel, just as
none will ever always do what Catholics want or Greek Americans or
farmers,” said a former Jewish American policymaker who served in
high-level positions in several administrations. “When you are in an
administration you know this is coming. If the variance is in the
particular area you cover, it can be painful. If it gets repeated, you
need to change jobs or leave the government. That’s normal.”

But: “The Obama situation is not normal,” he continued, “due to the
length and depth of the confrontation with Israel and the harm that’s
being done. It should give rise to soul searching by Jewish appointees.
In my view they’ve become enablers, in the worst sense of that word.
That not one single Jew has left in protest is remarkable considering
that relations have not been worse in a long, long time.”

By not resigning in protest, Obama’s Jewish aides have arguably not
only harmed their community; they weakened their own position—which was,
in a sense, ultimately far more detrimental. In a town where the
appearance of power is power, Obama’s Jewish defenders had no idea which
way the president was actually going. They got played, and now everyone
knows it. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew wasn’t in the room when Obama was
making Iran policy with Ben Rhodes and Valerie Jarrett. Martin Indyk
didn’t know that a central part of Obama’s Middle East policy—without
which the Iran deal would be impossible—was to weaken AIPAC,
the cornerstone of the pro-Israel community. AIPAC, in turn, didn’t see
itself as a target of the Obama Administration. Instead, it kept
telling itself that bipartisan support for Israel was the very premise
of its power. Had these actors actually participated in helping the
president pull a fast one on the Jewish community, at least they’d have
showed they had connections to power. The biggest problem with the Jews
around Obama is not that they spoke up on behalf of policies that may
very well turn out to be harmful to the Jewish state; it’s that they
were so clearly out of the loop—a status quo they will now bequeath to
future administrations.

In this regard, even AIPAC’s ostensible rival J Street got played. As
one senior official in the pro-Israel community told me, he believes
that “their standing has diminished a lot. The administration used J
Street and included them, and went to their conferences, because they
believed they would be a useful tool.” But J Street is weakened not, as
the pro-Israel official believes, because it plowed its own field
recklessly. If you describe yourself as a pro-Israel organization then
your power is directly proportional to how important a role Israel plays
in American foreign policy. If your actions, like J Street’s,
contribute to making Israel about as important to American foreign
policy as Malaysia is, then you aren’t very important either.

Oren is an historian and he has an historian's perspective. I'm sure he sees everything that Smith sees and has many more facts and data points to prove what Smith is saying. Unfortunately, Oren is getting no support here in Israel, other than Netanyahu's refusal to disown him.... Yet Oren disowned Netanyahu by running for the Knesset with Kahlon's party. Perhaps there's a lesson there for the historian too.

In the meantime, my copy of Oren's book is on order. Can't wait to read this one.

2 Comments:

You haven't figured this out yet, I see. These Obama/Clinton/KhmerRouge Kerry Progressive Marcuse/Alinsky Democrats don't give a hoot about you in Israel or we in the US. The only question remaining is whether they care about their own Democrat Posse as special people or whether they are suicidal nihilists ready to delete humankind. I'm unsure about that last question. Why not Israel start giving some ink inches to the Republicans, part of whom will do anything to siphon the US Treasury and use US Govt Agencies to delete their market competition... or better yet, the Cruz Constitution Faction, which actually could keep Western Civilization on the top of the cliff with a chance to regain our footing... But seemingly every Israeli source I see ONLY talks about Democrats, preventing the diaspora from taking a cue that Republicans (and preferably the Constitution faction) are preferable to the Jewish enterprise that the Commie Dems.

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I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com